Could the Iraq war have been prevented had the American media asked the right questions? How do conservative media commentators frame the actions of different religious communities? Does the media pay due attention to history?

INCREASINGLY FOCUSED ON competitiveness and profits, the mainstream American media is under pressure for its own survival. Indeed, it is at a critical juncture of having to choose between fulfilling its societal responsibility or succumbing to the political compulsions of our times. As a society we need to evaluate the importance of the media in our American system of governance. Does it still play the crucial role the founding fathers of our nation had envisioned for it?

Thomas Jefferson made a strong statement about the role of the media in a democracy when he noted, “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Describing the role of the press, George A. Krimsky, the former head of news for the Associated Press’ World Services and co-author of Hold the Press, writes, “In the wake of America’s successful revolution, it was decided there should indeed be government, but only if it were accountable to the people. The people, in turn, could only hold the government accountable if they knew what it was doing and could intercede as necessary, using their ballot, for example. This role of public ‘watchdog’ was thus assumed by a citizen press, and as a consequence, the government in the United States has been kept out of the news business.”

Could one say that the government in the United States was kept out of the news business in the past, but not any more?

In the recent past, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told host Howard Kurtz that the Bush administration had “the right” to pay a columnist to tout its views in his column. As this article notes, Kurtz spoke of the “Pentagon planting positive stories, in some cases paying for positive stories in Iraqi newspapers.” The administration also paid journalist Armstrong Williams to promote its No Child Left Behind education policy. The Government Accountability Office, however, determined that the Bush Administration was wrong in promoting its educational policy through Armstrong’s column.

The essence of democracy is the ability to question everything in fairness and without worrying about censure against such inquiry. How many journalists from the mainstream media have failed this test in recent times? Let us examine a few situations and see the specific failures of the American media in each case.

The qualities of a commander-in-chief

As we speak, the airwaves are saturated with coverage of the presidential nominees in both parties. Why aren’t journalists questioning the rhetoric from McCain and Clinton that they are fit to be the commander-in-chief of the nation? We are a democracy, and it is not essential that our government should be run by a military expert. That was not the intent of our system.

I do not expect my president to be an expert in nuclear, biological, botanical, or other sciences and certainly not a military expert. I want a judicious person who can call on real experts as the situation demands and make the right decision in each case.

Journalists can still ask the candidates this question. Will they?

Precedent and patterns in the Rev. Wright controversy

The second week of March 2008 witnessed relentless coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, “God Damn America,” in the American media. It was all one could hear on the cable channels. The pundits were suggesting that this might indicate the end of presidential candiate Barack Obama’s political aspirations, given that Wright was Obama’s pastor.

In the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Ralph Luker pointed out that “the quotation comes not from Wright, but from the Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s first address to the Montgomery Improvement Association on December 5, 1955. Both African-American preachers have understood prophetic biblical preaching far better than those who feign shock at and condemn Wright’s words.”

“Obama’s Minister ‘Hates America’ But When My Father Said the Same Sort of Things He Became a Hero To The Republicans”  wrote Frank Schaeffer in the OpEdNews. Schaeffer quoted his father, religious right leader, Francis Schaeffer, expressing similar sentiments. “Take Dad’s words” Frank Schaeffer went on to say, “and put them in the mouth of Obama’s preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet, when we the white Religious Right denounced America, the white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words ‘godly’ and ‘prophetic’ and a ‘call to repentance.’”

The mainstream media largely failed to investigate if there was a precedent, if some one else had used this kind of language, if the reaction had been different, and why that might have been the case.

The burning of the US embassy in Kosovo

While driving around on Friday, February 22 earlier this year, I listened to every news channel. Our embassy was torched in Kosovo by radicals on that day. The media did not describe the violence as religiously motivated nor name any religious community as the culprit. I believe that was the right approach on the part of the media.

But I wondered: had those radicals been Muslims, what kind of demonization would mainstream conservative commentators like O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh have engaged in?

The war in Iraq

As the Bill Moyers Journal’s special edition program, “Buying the War,” compellingly demonstrated, the mainstream American media uncritically accepted the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and his links to Al-Qaeda. The five chapter report speaks for itself.

Had the media stood their ground, perhaps our administration would not have engaged in policies that have resulted in the deaths of over half a million Iraqis as per the figures provided by the medical journal Lancet estimate, 4,000 of our men and women, and a cost of anywhere from 1 to 2 trillion dollars.

Was their inability to ask the right questions of the administration not a colossal blunder on the part of the mainstream media?

Mike Ghouse is a writer and activist based in Dallas. He runs the blogs Foundation for Pluralism and World Muslim Congress.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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IN TIMES OF WAR, when PR mates unashamedly with frenzied nationalism, heroes are born by the dozen. It is a union the national media facilitates joyfully, never mind the ethical questions ignored therein.

Prince Harry’s rebirth is remarkable even by that standard. If in the past the media had only been passive or active participants in such passions, this time around it has been pronouncedly proactive.

I am all for responsible journalism, but I am not convinced by the ‘responsibility’ the British media showed in Harry’s Afghan adventures. I have three issues with it.

One, like Jon Snow, I believe the decision erodes media credibility. Particularly so, given the premeditated nature of the event. This was no spontaneous episode that had to be contained — Harry didn’t wake up one fine morning and go to Afghanistan on his own, he was sent there — and as such there was no ethical compulsion on the media to agree to an embargo. It agreed because it managed a backroom barter: here is our silence, now you give us Harry in soundbites and videoclips.

As a journalist fairly familiar with military actions, I understand that agreements at the tactical level form the heart of many war reports. I will even say all reports involve some kind of a ‘deal’ — no source talks to you for the pure love of talking, there is always a quid pro quo.

While I am reasonably comfortable with that at a personal level, I am not so with a strategic deal of this sort. It was not as if there was a national peril looming and the media had to close flanks and rush to uphold its responsibility to the society. Even if that was the case, I am not sure that is the best strategy, but that is another argument.

So the media did what it did for a ‘better’ story. I am sure the decision was debated, even “agonized” over, but the point is it went through — and something tells me the editors were thinking more of circulation and audience figures and page views than quality journalism.

All in all, it reminds me a bit of the arms deals you see in movies.

The kind in which regimes buy guns, receive kickbacks — and the public carries on oblivious.

Mr Chomsky, you were right

The public carried on oblivious. That is my second point.

Public opinion is crucial in a democratic society, we all know. We also know the media’s fundamental responsibility is to provide for a public sphere, an arena where citizens can exchange thoughts and ideas and question political will.

By agreeing to a blackout, the British media did exactly the opposite. Not only did it not provide for an informed public sphere, it did not provide for any public sphere.

Worse, it strangled the life out of one. That is first-degree murder.

Result? No debate on a decision of political significance (let me point you to Simon Jenkin’s arguments for why this is significant). Some 15 MoD officials, the media, and the prince’s family and close friends knew of it — and they, I am sure you will agree, do not constitute the general public.

I guess Mr Chomsky was right.

Plugs and princely servings

More alarming is what happened after Matt Drudge did his bit.

Even as the media patted itself on the back for the ‘restraint’ it showed with one hand, with the other it dished out princely servings of Harry topped with every sinful dressing in the spin world.

There was Harry firing a machine gun, Harry on a motorbike; Harry shirtless, Harry tucking into jam and biscuits; Harry playing rugby, Harry ‘patrolling’ on foot; Harry talking of mom, Harry rejecting the ‘hero’ label…

As ‘anti-establishment’ British Parliamentarian George Galloway put it, the media gave him to us “as the pin-up of the armed forces, one of the lads, full of derring-do, a British hero on Afghanistan’s plains straight out of Tennyson or Kipling”.

This is all too slick for my sceptical mind. I can’t believe the boy prone to publicity bloopers till the other day is suddenly doing and saying such pat things all on his own.

I certainly can’t believe the mainstream journalists were taken in by this ‘transformation’ either.

The sheer volume, the all-positive spin, the slickness of it, all points to media management and compliance. Not just on what to cover when, but on how to as well. God help us if this was the “deeper insight into a new side of Prince Harry” that Society of Editors chief Bob Satchell promised us.

The long and short of it is that publicists have managed to turn Harry into a hero overnight. And the media, the mediator of the public, its watchdog, processed — nay, happily assisted — it with no questions asked.

Perhaps Harry is the stuff heroes are made of. Perhaps he isn’t. As of now we have no evidence, bar the words of sources — and the media — recorded in a prearranged PR exercise.

They used to have a word for such reportage in old-fashioned journalism: plug.

The cost of compliance

In postscript, a few questions…

If you are not part of a deal, can you really “blow” it? The “understanding” on the Harry story was between the MoD and British editors. In other words, the “foreign press” — read New Idea, Bild and Drudge Report – were not under embargo. So were they “irresponsible”? Or were they doing their duty to their readers, who, not incidentally, are not British?

Given the extent to which the British army went to ensure Harry’s security (they spent nearly half a year just negotiating media silence), how credible is the claim Harry ran “the same risks as everyone else in his battle group”?

From what I read on discussion boards, the majority of British public appears happy with the blackout. Could this be because the British media supported it and hence took pains to persuade the public to see its way?

If the public is happy with one blackout, will it embolden the media to go for more of such in future?

All in all, was the exercise worth the price of media compliance? Did it achieve something in the larger scheme of things?

I see one positive. This debate.

See also: Whose prince? Whose war?

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